Parent-bashing is the latest craze, indulged in by everyone from Roseanne Arnold and LaToya Jackson to the many non-celebrities who turn up as guests on the daytime blabfests.Certainly, many people have been horribly abused by their parents, and no one is taking that lightly. But it's getting to the point where even people who had relatively normal childhoods are searching their memories for evidence of parental malfeasance - anything to help explain away their own shortcomings.It is in this atmosphere of familial recrimination that The Prince of Tides appears.

Hannah, an actor and writer who appeared in the films Driving Miss Daisy and Fried Green Tomatoes, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Atlanta. He was 54. Hannah, who didn't become an actor until he was older than 30, also appeared in The Prince of Tides and several other feature films. His last movie was Fled. Hannah of Atlanta also coached actor Nick Nolte on how to deliver a Southern drawl in The Prince of Tides. He appeared in the television series Matlock and the made-in-Georgia productions of In the Heat of the Night and Savannah.

Pat Conroy was ''tickled'' - his word and one that you'd expect a Southern writer to use - to read that The Addams Family broke box-office records when it opened last month.He thinks this bodes well for The Prince of Tides, the soon-to-be-released movie starring Barbra Streisand, which is based on his best-selling novel. The movies deal with the same subject: life in a dysfunctional family.The movies deal with the same subject: life in a dysfunctional family.''If you get the Addams family out of costume, you might have the Wingo family,'' Conroy says with a drawl that is unaffected by his having left the South five years ago. He has lived in San Francisco for the past year.

**** Hear My Song (Paramount, 105 minutes, R): Thirty years before Hear My Song begins, an Irish tenor named Josef Locke wins the hearts of English audiences with his resonant voice and romantic repertoire. But at the height of his fame, Locke disappears, slipping away from a disagreement with the English government about his income tax. Locke, played by Ned Beatty, is an actual person, and although many of the film's other characters are invented, virtually all are a joy to get to know. Peter Chelsom, the 30ish writer-director making his feature-film debut, has an old-fashioned approach to storytelling that seems fresh because, although it's not the least bit slick, it's clever.

You'd think it would be every woman's fantasy: making love to a famous hunk while precisely choreographing his every twist and turn. But for Barbra Streisand, it was more like an exquisite form of agony.''I'm not an exhibitionist in any way,'' she explained, thinking back to the embarrassment of filming her steamy love scenes with Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides, which she produced, directed and stars in. ''I do not like scenes like that.''Dressed entirely in seductive black, Streisand was sharing her thoughts about the new production (which opens Christmas Day)

Skip the movieI went to see the film The Prince of Tides with my heart in my mouth. Of course, there is always some trepidation involved in seeing a good novel turned into a movie. Will it remain true to the book's spirit, like The Accidental Tourist? Or will it be a disaster, like The Bonfire of the Vanities? Either way, one risks remembering ever after the director's vision of the story rather than the author's.And the risk for the reader is even greater when you're talking about an especially well-loved novel such as Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides.

Hannah, an actor and writer who appeared in the films Driving Miss Daisy and Fried Green Tomatoes, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Atlanta. He was 54. Hannah, who didn't become an actor until he was older than 30, also appeared in The Prince of Tides and several other feature films. His last movie was Fled. Hannah of Atlanta also coached actor Nick Nolte on how to deliver a Southern drawl in The Prince of Tides. He appeared in the television series Matlock and the made-in-Georgia productions of In the Heat of the Night and Savannah.

Writer Pat Conroy makes no bones about the fact that his novels have rattled a few family skeletons.''My sister quit talking to me two years ago when she heard I was writing The Prince of Tides,'' Conroy said recently. ''Every time I write a book, someone in the family stops talking to me.''But it was family that brought Conroy to Orlando last week for a one-day hiatus in his cross-country promotional tour for The Prince of Tides, his best-selling new novel about the troubled history of a Southern family.

Three forthcoming books deal with the subject of child abuse and all three have been written by Floridians.Sen. Paula Hawkins' book, Children at Risk, will be published by the Washington, D.C., firm of Adler & Adler in September. The $16.95 hard-cover is subtitled My Fight Against Child Abuse -- A Personal Story and a Public Plea. It will detail Hawkins' childhood experience as a victim of sexual molestation and will explain what family and friends can do to prevent and deal with child abuse.

It didn't take an Oliver Stone to sense, if not a conspiracy, then an emerging pattern at Monday evening's Academy Awards: Oscar loves food.In the movie Bugsy, the jealous gangster played by Warren Beatty ignores the shrimp dinner prepared for him by his mistress-with-a-past, played by Annette Bening, until he reasserts his manhood by forcing a thieving associate to bark like a dog and oink like a pig.Appetite restored, he eats ravenously until the shrimp...

Strong, sensitive and squared-away at last, he's a man's man that women can't resist.We're talking about Nick Nolte - ''The Sexiest Man Alive!'' - according to last week's People magazine.Actually, we're not talking about Nick Nolte at all. We're talking about Pat Conroy, the man who wrote The Prince of Tides, thereby creating the best role Nick Nolte ever played.It's Pat Conroy we love, not Nick Nolte. It's Pat Conroy who wrote: ''My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

Brace yourself. This may hurt a little.Here are some things and people that were called ''middlebrow'' by critics in major U.S. newspapers last year:James Michener, Andrew Lloyd Webber (more than once), the Hamlet movie starring Mel Gibson, Hitler's taste in art, dinner theater, a novel about Columbus by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Blondie (the comic strip) and somebody named Willie Nile.Ow! Middlebrow is not usually a nice word.''It's a snobby word,'' said Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, who admits to having wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, with his own attitude toward middlebrow.

Hollywood had its best holiday week in history, but ticket sales for 1991 were down, production costs soared and some studios stood on the brink of financial collapse.The hits Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Silence of the Lambs ended the year box-office rich but studio poor. Even 4-week-old Hook, with $82 million in grosses, has yet to make a penny because of the $70 million film's complicated contract with director Steven Spielberg and stars Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams.For the first weekend of 1992, Hook made $11.5 million.

Skip the movieI went to see the film The Prince of Tides with my heart in my mouth. Of course, there is always some trepidation involved in seeing a good novel turned into a movie. Will it remain true to the book's spirit, like The Accidental Tourist? Or will it be a disaster, like The Bonfire of the Vanities? Either way, one risks remembering ever after the director's vision of the story rather than the author's.And the risk for the reader is even greater when you're talking about an especially well-loved novel such as Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides.

Hollywood had its best holiday week in history, but ticket sales for 1991 were down, production costs soared and some studios stood on the brink of financial collapse.The hits Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Silence of the Lambs ended the year box-office rich but studio poor. Even 4-week-old Hook, with $82 million in grosses, has yet to make a penny because of the $70 million film's complicated contract with director Steven Spielberg and stars Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams.For the first weekend of 1992, Hook made $11.5 million.

**** Hear My Song (Paramount, 105 minutes, R): Thirty years before Hear My Song begins, an Irish tenor named Josef Locke wins the hearts of English audiences with his resonant voice and romantic repertoire. But at the height of his fame, Locke disappears, slipping away from a disagreement with the English government about his income tax. Locke, played by Ned Beatty, is an actual person, and although many of the film's other characters are invented, virtually all are a joy to get to know. Peter Chelsom, the 30ish writer-director making his feature-film debut, has an old-fashioned approach to storytelling that seems fresh because, although it's not the least bit slick, it's clever.

Parent-bashing is the latest craze, indulged in by everyone from Roseanne Arnold and LaToya Jackson to the many non-celebrities who turn up as guests on the daytime blabfests.Certainly, many people have been horribly abused by their parents, and no one is taking that lightly. But it's getting to the point where even people who had relatively normal childhoods are searching their memories for evidence of parental malfeasance - anything to help explain away their own shortcomings.It is in this atmosphere of familial recrimination that The Prince of Tides appears.

You'd think it would be every woman's fantasy: making love to a famous hunk while precisely choreographing his every twist and turn. But for Barbra Streisand, it was more like an exquisite form of agony.''I'm not an exhibitionist in any way,'' she explained, thinking back to the embarrassment of filming her steamy love scenes with Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides, which she produced, directed and stars in. ''I do not like scenes like that.''Dressed entirely in seductive black, Streisand was sharing her thoughts about the new production (which opens Christmas Day)